Minimum job price & travel-time calculator
Count the drive, the setup, and the paperwork. See what a small job has to bill to hit your rate. See also whether the price you were about to quote is above or below that. Updates live as you type. No signup, nothing saved, nothing sent anywhere.
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Minimum job price and travel-time calculator
Every hour, not just the billable ones. This is usually the labor rate you put on an invoice. Do not paste in the figure from the rate calculator. That is a billable-hour rate. The hours you can bill already carry the ones you cannot. To bring its numbers over, take the annual revenue target it shows you. Divide that by every hour you work in a year, billable or not.
The part you were going to bill for.
Per job, not per week.
Your own fuel-and-wear estimate. Leave it at 0 if the rate above already includes fuel and vehicle wear. Otherwise you charge for the van twice. For a mileage rate, use your tax authority’s published figure for the year rather than one here.
Mark them up with the free markup & margin calculator.
See the call-out fee glossary entry.
Drives the verdict below.
You were going to bill for 1h of a 2h 15m job.
Your $0.00 call-out fee already covers 0m of this job at your target rate.
That’s $15.22/hr under your $65.00/hr target rate.
No rate yet? Start with the free rate calculator. It works out a billable-hour rate. Divide the annual revenue target it shows you by all your working hours before you use the figure up here. Mark up materials with the markup & margin calculator, or see all free tools.
The hour you bill is not the hour the job costs you
Take a job with an hour on site. It also has a 40-minute round trip. Add 15 minutes to set up and pack the van. Add 20 minutes to write the quote and the invoice. That is 2h 15m for a job you were about to bill as one hour. The other hour and a quarter still happened. It did not show up on the invoice. The quoted price had to cover all of it, not just the time with tools in hand. At $65 an hour, the true minimum is well above one hour of labor. The gap is the time nobody sees on the invoice.
What actually counts as unpaid time
None of it looks like idle time from the inside. It just does not get its own line on the invoice. The drive there and back. Setting up and loading the van again after. The supplier run for the part you did not have on the truck. Writing the quote, then the invoice once the work is done, then a follow-up message if it runs late. Every one of those minutes is real. A small job has fewer billable hours than a big job to spread that cost across. So the smallest jobs are the most likely to lose money.
Whether that time is really uncovered depends on how you built your rate. Suppose you divided a yearly target across only the hours you can invoice. Then the unbillable time is already in your rate. If you feed that figure in above, the minimum comes out too high. The drive and the paperwork get paid for twice. The note under the rate field says how to convert it. The math here uses the simpler reading. The rate is what you want to clear for every hour the job occupies. Most people read a labor rate on an invoice this way.
Three ways to make a small job pay
None of these need a higher hourly rate. They recover the fixed cost of showing up:
- A minimum charge. Set a floor under every job. A fifteen-minute fix then still covers the drive and the paperwork around it. You do not price it as if the visit was free.
- A call-out fee, credited against the work. State it up front. Take it off the total if the job goes ahead. It covers a wasted trip. It does not feel like an extra charge on the jobs that go ahead.
- Batching by area or day. Group jobs that are close together or on the same street. The travel minutes in this calculator drop for every job in the batch, not just the first one.
When the answer is no
Sometimes the honest number is more than the job is worth. The drive may be too far for too little on-site time. Or the client may never accept the price. Turn the job down cleanly and give a clear reason. That costs less goodwill than a vague maybe that goes quiet. The polite-decline script in the new-inquiry templates covers that message. Saying no then leaves the door open for the next job.
Once a job clears this bar, read how to price a job so the number holds up. It covers materials and margin for the work itself. Responding to a new inquiry covers the reply that gets you to this decision.
Common questions
Should I charge for travel time?
Someone has to pay for it. You can use a separate travel line, a call-out fee, or a higher hourly rate. The drive costs you time even if the invoice does not name it. This calculator counts it as part of the job’s real time. You see the effect and decide how to charge for it.
Which hourly rate should I put in?
Use the rate you want to clear for every hour the job takes you. For most trades, that is the labor rate on the invoice. It is not a billable-hour rate. You build a billable-hour rate by dividing a yearly target across only the hours you can invoice. That rate already covers your travel and admin. If you put it in here, the calculator counts that time twice and the minimum comes out too high. If you have that figure, divide its annual revenue target by all the hours you work in a year.
What’s a fair minimum charge for a small job?
There is no market number to quote. Your minimum comes from your own rate and your own typical trip. Another person’s job would give a different figure. Run your numbers through the calculator above. Treat the result as your minimum for a job like this one.
Does the time spent quoting and invoicing actually count?
Yes. On every job you spend real minutes to write the quote and send the invoice. You spend more if you chase it. None of that time shows up as billable time on the invoice. Leave it out of the math, and every small job quietly pays for your own paperwork.
Will a call-out fee put people off?
Less than finding out about one after the visit does. State it up front, before you are on site. Most people accept paying something for a tradesperson to show up. The pushback usually comes from a fee nobody mentioned. See the call-out fee glossary entry for the wording.
Want every small job tracked without the spreadsheet?
BizBinder turns a job like this one into a job record and an invoice. The decision this calculator helps you make stays with the job after you close the tab.
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A person reads every request. You will hear from us within one business day.
- 01 A person reads your note — not a queue.
- 02 You get an invite as spots open.
- 03 Your admin starts filing itself.
The free library is open while you wait. Nothing in it needs an account.
- guide Responding to a new inquiry Everything else in this stage assumes this reply is right.
- tool Lead source check Enter what each source of enquiries won, cost, and took. The tool shows the win rate, the revenue, and the cost per won job for each source. It ranks them from cheapest to most expensive.
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